We Must Have the Mail
The postal service may not mean what it once did to most of us, but it’s still vital to the lives of many Americans and to their ability to cast their votes.
By Mary Daily
It’s scary to think of the U.S. Postal Service under attack. The arrival of the mail was always a highlight of the day to me. What surprise or good news might it bring? When I was growing up in Alabama, we watched for the postman coming down the street and the red flag on our mailbox to go down, letting us know he’d been there. On hot summer days, I liked to take him a big drink of water.
The mail brought us invitations to weddings, birth announcements, letters of college acceptance, notes from distant friends and faraway pen pals, or highly hoped-for love letters. I watched for cool postage stamps to add to my collection, and I still use beautiful or unusual stamps in the collages I make. With stamps that commemorate causes or public figures, we quietly send messages and express our positions.
The mail brought packages and presents, sometimes unexpected. When I was 18, I had a summer fellowship at a small university in Tennessee. Over the five weeks I was there, I developed a crush on a boy named Dan who was in the same program. I told him how much I wished for a Ford Mustang. After I got home, one day out of the blue, a package arrived for me — a beautiful red model Mustang from Dan. It made my month!
The mail was also how we paid bills, filed insurance claims and tax returns, and kept in touch with family and friends. My mother and her brother, who lived in Denver, wrote to each other every Sunday afternoon. His letters arrived in our mail like clockwork. Our neighbor lady and her daughter set aside an afternoon a week to write letters. And when there was an election, the mail provided a way to cast a vote if you couldn’t travel to the polling place. Absentee voting dates back to the 19th century.
In my hometown, the post office was our most majestic building. It also served as a federal courthouse, so it was larger than many of our buildings, with a grand staircase and marble floors. Sitting on a hill with stately columns in front, it seemed to rise above everything else in both altitude and stature. As a child, I loved to go there and look around while my dad took care of business.
On the farm where my grandparents lived in a remote rural area, the mail carrier came by car and put the letters in the boxes the way we use drive-throughs today. His name was Worley Barnett, and he became more than a mailman. When my grandparents were older, Worley often came in to check on them and ask what they needed from town that he could bring the next day. Years later, he came to my mother’s funeral. We were all so happy to see him.
Over the decades, we’ve all watched postal workers diligently doing their jobs. We took them for granted and never doubted that we could depend on them. During the holiday season, the carriers often worked way past dark to get everything delivered. It’s heartbreaking now to see their days made harder by the removal of the support they depend on. And it’s alarming to see neighborhood mail collection boxes removed or locked. Sure, with so much business and correspondence online now, we’ve lost much of our need for old-fashioned mail. But it still serves a vital role for many, none more critical than providing the chance to vote.
During the pandemic, remote learning — school from home — has revealed how many American families have no access to electronic communication. Email and web surfing are not part of their lives. They depend on the postal service as much as the rest of us once did. Cutting mail service is another way of marginalizing them. In the critical upcoming election, the mail is their only hope for casting their votes, as it is for many of our other fellow citizens who are unable to get to a polling place. Everything possible should be done to make voting by mail easy, not hard or impossible. Erecting barriers simply ensures that only some of our voices are heard. That’s not right, and it’s not American.
Mary Daily is a journalist in Los Angeles.
